English 127 Research Writing

Vik Bahl Winter 2010

Email: vbahl@greenriver.edu Phone: (253) 833-9126 x 4223 Sections: DEA; DEB Office:  HS-A 48 Office Hours: MTTh 2-3:30 pm & by appointment

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Comments on Drafts of the Final Research Article
Announcement #3 (3/11/10)

Final Draft of Final Research Article is due by Mon, Mar 15.  Email it as an attachment to vbahl@greenriver.edu. 

The last assignment for the quarter, the Self-Assessment, is due on Wed, Mar 17, also as an email attachment. 

I have read through your drafts of the Final Research Article.  Overall, I was impressed with the range of topics, the kinds of questions you were able to ask, and the research studies you designed.  I hope that the process has been rewarding and that you have learned substantial new things about a topic that you initially chose based on your own interest.  Hopefully you feel that you were able to generate "new" perspectives on your research question and that you were able to support your hypothesis.  While I will not be sending you individual comments on your drafts, I have prepared general comments below for the class as a whole.  Please read through these comments and suggestions carefully before and as you revise your papers.  Do not hesitate to contact me if you have specific questions about your drafts.  Also, I again urge you to take your drafts to the GRCC Writing Center (RLC 173, Mon-Thu 9 am-4:00 pm & Fri 9 am-3 pm; online tutoring available).

1. Not all of your drafts are complete.  Some of you may be missing a title page, an abstract, a References page, a discussion section, etc. My first recommendation, therefore, is to complete your papers to fulfill all of the required elements; also note that the text of your essays (not including the title, abstract, and References pages) should be 12-15 pages. Please take a few minutes to re-read the guidelines for the  Final Research Article. Even if you have read them before, something new might just click. For example, you will notice that the guidelines tell you not to use the first person ("I," "me," etc.) in your paper.  

2. Have you properly formatted your paper, following the Document Layout guidelines under "Format Instructions" as well as any relevant APA guidelines you may have found in your handbook or the Hacker website?  For formatting, you should pay attention to spacing, margins, page numbers, placement of title and subtitles, References page guidelines, Appendixes and illustrations.  When revising, use the opportunity to reflect on your title, subtitle and section headings--can you make them more precise or creative?

3. Paragraphs:  Paragraphs are the building blocks of any paper.  Academic paragraphs are generally between 1/3-3/4 of a page long.  There may be legitimate exceptions in your paper, but you challenge the attention span of your reader if you go much beyond 3/4 of a page in a paragraph, and your ideas will not be very well developed or complex if many of your paragraphs are too short. Each paragraph should have a distinct purpose in the overall architecture of your paper, which also means that each paragraph should have a topic sentence that a reader can identify.  Do not include a paragraph that merely tells a story or gives an example without interpreting their significance.  Do not have a paragraph that is one long quotation.  

4. Do you have a clear research question, which lays out the main inquiry that your paper will be trying to answer?  Your research question should not be so complicated that it actually includes several questions, nor should it be so simple that you are just looking for information that has already been produced and can be found in some publication.  Ideally, your research question should allow you to generate new data through original research, as well as to develop new insights through synthesis and interpretation. Even at this stage, it may not be too late to refine your research question so that you are not asking merely an informational, yes/no, pro/con, for/against, or either/or question.  Remember also that you need to have a hypothesis that is your proposed answer to your own research question.

5. Your background section should be more than one paragraph long since you are providing relevant historical background, statistics, laws and legislation, groups, debates, and other context.  Note that you have to be very selective in providing background information so that all of the details are directly related to your narrowed topic and research question.  Also, "history" need not refer only to the distant past but should also take us into the current moment.  For your topic and research question, what are the most significant developments in the last 5-10 years?

6. Your literature review section needs to focus on scholarly sources, that is, what have researchers contributed to our understanding of the topic and what debates might there continue to be?  Again, the literature review has to be tied directly to your research question.  Note that the FRA calls for at least five scholarly sources of the required fifteen.

7. Your Argument:  This is one of the new sections of writing for the FRA.  Can you clearly identify your claim, reasons, evidence, acknowledgments, and responses?  I am less concerned about warrants.  This section needs to include several citations and quotations, and it does need to clearly state your responses to at two or three possible opposing views or concerns that a reader might raise. 

8. Conclusion:  Keep in mind that you are not merely giving us your opinions in this paper.  In your conclusion, help us follow the movement from your understanding of what others have said (literature review), the development of your research question and argument, and a sense of what is significant about your contribution. 

9. Please pay attention to the details of the required sources for this project, including the required number, the recency of sources, etc.  Do you have at least one direct quotation from all of your fifteen sources?  Note that magazine/journal articles do not count as websites when they have appeared elsewhere in hardcopy print. Are you avoiding relying heavily on newspaper articles (at most 2-3 would be allowed of the required fifteen)?  Some of you have not included a reference to an article from Rereading America; while it may seem to you that your topic is not related to anything in our anthology of articles, you can still refer to one of the articles, perhaps based on its research method or its interpretive framework or its strategies of presentation, etc.  

10. Quotations and Citations:  Your use of material published by other folks is extremely important for this paper. Therefore, pay special attention to the details of putting together your References page and in formatting and punctuating in-text citations. Please review the relevant sections of your handbook or the Diana Hacker website (previous links) since no one can keep all of these things in their head. For example, don't number the entries on your References page; learn the difference between citing magazines vs. academic journals; place your References on a separate page, etc. 

Choice of sources and quotations is also extremely important. You need to make sure you are quoting primarily from scholarly sources, but also that you have examined a range of views, a range of publications, and even a range of types of publications. Therefore, you cannot just quote from people who agree with you. Nor can you only quote from one source primarily, or one type of source (a newspaper or magazine). When choosing your quotations and representing research and interpretations, make sure you are giving the full argument of different parties. Don't just tell us what they think, but also why they think what they think. 

Provide in-text citations with parenthetical information about the author, year of publication and page number (or paragraph number for web-based documents). Remember that you cannot just include quotations without interpreting them and linking them to your research question or thesis.  Also, include signal phrases (setup statements) that integrate the quotations into your own writing, and alert readers to your intended purpose for including the quotation.  Here is an example:

According to Kirby (1999), some critics have accused activists in the Great Ape Project of "exaggerating the supposed similarities of the apes [to humans] to stop their use in experiments" (Shared Path section, para. 6). 

Here are some additional comments on the punctuation for your entries on the References page:

• There continue to be frequent problems with punctuation. For example, you need to have a period after the author(s), after the title of an article (but before the end-quotation mark), and at the very end of the entry.  All of your entries need to be double-spaced with no extra space between entries.  Entries should not be numbered; they should be alphabetized by last name or organization name (or the title of the article or source if no author or organization name is available).
  

• Magazines and academic journals have different citation forms. With a magazine, you give the full date following the author; with a journal, only the year. Journals also have a volume number that you include after the journal title; most magazines will not have volume numbers, though some may.

Magazine
Raloff, J. (2001, May 12). Lead therapy won't help most kids. Science
      News, 292.  Retrieved May 21, 2003, from ProQuest Direct database. 

Academic Journal
Morawski, J. (2000). Social psychology a century ago. American
      Psychologist, 55, 427-431.  Retrieved April 19, 2003, from 
      Expanded Academic ASAP database (A59317972).     

• Many people aren't quite sure when something is a magazine and when it is an academic journal. If you use Academic Search Premier or ProQuest and choose "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals,” then your search results will produce a listing of articles from academic journals. Also, when you look at the date of the article, if it gives a complete date (day, month, year), it is most likely a magazine (or newspaper), though there are some exceptions like JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association. When the date includes Winter, Summer, Fall, or Spring, then it is a journal. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that ProQuest gives the volume and issue number even for magazines; don't include these for magazines, only for journals. In general, keep in mind that academic journals are not targeted at general readers, but at a more specialized audience of experts in the field. You should be able to tell from the language of the article whether the source is a magazine or a journal.
  

• Don't include titles such as MD or Ph.D. after the author names on your Reference page.
  

• While APA format does not ask you to place interviews on your References page unless they have been published somewhere, I would like you to include the formal interview(s) with any expert you might have conducted for this paper.  Here is an example:  
  
  Stedmann, J.K. (2002, September 9). Professor of Economics, Washington 
         State University. Interview.
  
  For more informal interviews, conversations or emails, you do not have to create separate entries on your References page.  It is enough to include the information parenthetically in the body of your paper.  Here are two examples:
  
  … as discussed with G. F. Johnson (personal communication, April 16, 2003).
  
  … in an email, the author stated, "All of the children are slender” (A. B. Dickson, personal communication, May 1, 2003).
  

• When you cannot find an author for a source, do NOT write "Unknown" or "Anonymous."  Just begin the entry with the title of the article or source, which is also what you should use for in-text citations.  
  

• In your article titles, make sure only the first letters of the first words in the title and subtitle are capitalized. 
  

• There's been a question about whether articles from ProQuest or Academic Search Premier should be considered websites. No, since they appeared in hard copy print somewhere before. Only consider governmental, organizational, educational, commercial, or personal websites as websites. However, even articles you have gotten from ProQuest need to have all the relevant information required for citing periodicals. Don't leave this out when you got your magazine, newspaper or journal article from this database.
  

• Don't abbreviate the year. Use 2000 instead of 00 or 1999 instead of 99.
  

• Give complete date information when possible, especially for news stories. Don't just give the year when there is more info available (except for journals).